CHAPTER 4: THE AUDIT ON THE BLACK GRANITE
I walked down the twenty-foot center aisle of the West Conference Room.
My leather boots left dark, geometric tread marks across the greenstone floorboards:
*crunch… tack… crunch.*
Barnaby walked beside me, his paws striking the stone in synchronized cadence.
Admiral Mercer walked on my right flank, our father’s chronometer watch ticking steadily on my wrist:
*tack… tack… tack.*
We stopped at the head of the black granite table, two paces from the Chief Justice’s leather throne.
I did not draw a weapon.
I reached inside my tweed jacket, pulled out the thick, faded blue vellum envelope containing the original 1944 Mercer Sovereign Charter, and slammed it flat atop the Chief Justice’s sixty-billion-dollar Swiss conveyance deed:
THUD.
The heavy granite table seemed to absorb the blow with a dull, subterranean groan:
“Look at the vellum, Arthur,” Eleanor said softly:
“Look at line four of the master title patent.”
Chief Justice Arthur Vance’s face calcified into an apocalyptic, curdled shade of un-cured limestone.
His pupils dilated until the slate-gray of his irises was swallowed completely by black.
His large, manicured hands, flat on the granite table, began to tremble with that spastic, involuntary tremor of an embezzler whose vault door has just been blown off its hinges by an artillery shell:
*tick-tick-tick-tick.*
“The… the Mercer Charter…?” Arthur gasped, his voice cracking into that thin, pathetic squeak:
“Harold… Harold swore to me that the widow was completely broken! That you were an ordinary, frail seventy-one-year-old woman who could be pushed off her land by an entitled boy on a motorcycle!”
“Eleanor was the master crypto-auditor who designed the analog failsafes with her late husband Robert twelve years ago, Arthur,” Vice Admiral David Mercer spoke from behind our shoulders.
His voice was sixty decibels of mountain quarry explosive:
“She audited your enterprise while Harold was bragging about his commercial plazas.”
“She protected this nation’s bedrock while your family was plotting to pave over the emergency flues of Conduit Ten.”
Admiral Mercer slammed his service portfolio onto the granite table:
KABOOOOM.
The impact pulverized a corner of the black stone into white powder, sending hairline fractures through the Swiss banking contracts:
“Under Section Fourteen-B of the Mercer Admiralty Founding Indenture of Nineteen-Forty-Four…”
Young Eleanor Mercer stepped forward, opening her leather portfolio, her voice cutting through the vault:
“…the chief certifying surveyor who established the sovereign defense conduits of the Atlantic and Piedmont command sectors… retains an un-divided, un-alienable fifty-one percent legal equity in the property in perpetuity.”
